In some wireless system deployments the base stations reuse one or more frequency channels for transmission very frequently in space (also called aggressive frequency reuse). In some cases the same frequency may be used by neighboring base stations transmitting on the same time/frequency resources, often resulting in high interference levels or low signal-to-interference ratios at the receiver of many of the user equipment served by the base station. In scenarios where the interference is a significant impairment for the link quality between the base station and a user equipment, improved understanding of the interference (for example the one or more dominating sources, the statistics, the time/frequency/spatial distribution vs. transmission mode) could assist in assigning transmit frequency channels to the base stations, scheduling downlink resource blocks to user equipment, adapting the transmission mode, etc. Therefore it is desirable to have improved systems and methods for characterizing interference based on scheduling a transmission mode.